In the following essay, Allen discusses Flannery O'Connor's use of animal imagery to depict her notion of the world as a zoo of misfits in her novel Wise Blood.

In Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, Frederick Asals observes that Wise Blood “seems to have become the whipping-boy of the O'Connor canon, a mass of faults that reveals the greater expertise of The Violent Bear It Away or the superiority of the stories to both novels.”1 Objections to Wise Blood go as far back as the letter one man wrote to O'Connor demanding to know “what happened to the guy in the ape suit.”2 Subsequent complaints about the novel have also centered on Enoch Emery—in particular on the supposed disconnectedness of his subplot from the structure...